- Gigabyte G5 | RTX 4060 |
$1,099.99$799.99 - Asus TUF A16 | Radeon RX 7600S |
$1,099.99$749.99
Angling for a cheap gaming laptop doesn’t make the hunt for a good price any easier—especially when every seller’s yelling for attention on your search engine of choice. Good thing you’ve got us, eh? Especially when we might just wind up saving you $300. That’s a lot of dough to save when you’re hunting for budget builds like the Gigabyte G5 or the Asus TUF A16, sporting the latest Nvidia and AMD GPUs respectively.
First things first—the Gigabyte G5. This thing’s packed with a 10-core, 16-thread CPU, a RTX 4060, 16 gigs of RAM, and a 512GB SSD—which is a gaming minimum nowadays. No catches involved, either. Our G5 review calls it a “straightforward, well-built, and cleverly provisioned gaming laptop.”
Normally this’d fetch you $1,149 o…
Ambitious full conversion mod Fallout: London finally arrived late last month, and it’s a “truly impressive modding achievement” according to our own Joshua Wolens—and he’d know, he lives in the UK and has an accent and everything. The mod can also be a bit difficult to get running smoothly at the moment, unfortunately. As Joshua also said, “it crashes smoother than any Bethesda game I’ve played.”
The developers of Fallout: London, Team FOLON, are aware of the issues and are hard at working fixing them. According to an announcement in the mod’s official Discord today, there’s a hotfix and a proper patch in the works, and they can even provide direct help to players having trouble getting the mod working.
“We are absolutely blown away by the incredible support from the community for our mod. Your enthusiasm and feedback mean the world to us!” said Team FOLON. They also acknowledged their work isn’t done yet and outlined what steps they’ll be taking next.
The m…
Turns out Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski’s mysterious tease about the future of his flopped FPS LawBreakers may have been a bit premature. Two weeks ago, he tweeted “Just got a text from my lawyers about… LawBreakers. Stay tuned” (before launching into a rant against people who “were rooting for the game to fail”), implying some kind of return for the now long-dead game. It’s now looking like that was based on a misunderstanding of who holds the game’s rights in 2023—a more recent tweet says “Well, turns out Nexon does own the rights to LawBreakers.” before appealing to Nexon’s CEO to DM him about a resurrection.
Nexon retaining the rights makes sense—they published the game when it originally launched in 2017. What’s less clear is what incentive they’d have to bring back LawBreakers. Though it reviewed well (we gave it a very respectable 84%), it was a desperate flop commercially and ultimately killed Bleszinski’s studio Boss Key Productions, making …
CD Projekt Red brought Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty to this year’s Summer Game Fest, and Morgan was immediately smitten with its new area, Dogtown. (He also keeps calling Idris Elba his new best friend, and it’s so sweet none of us have had the heart to correct him yet). From that demo we learned about the latest in CD Projekt’s ongoing march to patch over Cyberpunk’s glaring flaws, including new police AI with a GTA-style notoriety system, a skill tree for combat augments, and expanded car combat. But what comes after Phantom Liberty?
According to an interview with Bloomberg, director Gabe Amatangelo will be moving on to the sequel.
“Amatangelo said that after Phantom Liberty he will direct a full-blown sequel to Cyberpunk 2077,” writes Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. Directing Cyberpunk 2078 (a fake title I have just made up) is an impressive role for Amatangelo, who joined CD Projekt Red in January 2020, in the final year of Cyberpunk 2077’s development. He to…
I’ve never really got on with mobas, the exception to the rule being Blizzard’s excellent Heroes of the Storm. Inspired by Defense of the Ancients, the Warcraft 3 mod that birthed the entire genre, HotS was released in 2015 to a largely positive reception from critics and players. But despite the game’s quality, and years of support from Blizzard, it never managed to reach that critical mass of players.
Support had been winding down for years before, in mid-2022, Blizzard put the final bullet in HotS and announced the end of active development. The game continues to have hero rotations and the odd minor balance patch, but the news was nevertheless greeted with dismay by its hardcore fans. And some weren’t content to leave it there.
In something of a full circle moment, a mod team has now announced that the mod-that-became-a-game is now the subject of a new and impressively full-featured mod project. Resurgence of the Storm is a recreation of Heroes of the Storm wi…
inXile is a venerable studio with a long list of great games to its name, as well as series like The Bard’s Tale and Wasteland. Its latest title, the first since 2020’s Wasteland 3, is a whole new look for inXile, and a giant leap forwards for the studio in terms of the action focus and visuals. Wasteland is an isometric RPG. Clockwork Revolution, meanwhile, is a full, first-person immersive sim.
My instant reaction to the trailer was to think about Bioshock but, the more I’ve watched it, the more this suggests different directions from where that series went. An undoubted influence is Bioshock Infinite, many themes from which are present: rich vs. poor and a clear antagonist in control of the city, giant airships, clanking mechanoids, and time travel. But where Bioshock Infinite never did much gameplay-wise with the time travel, leaving it entirely for narrative set-pieces, Clockwork Revolution is built around the idea that you can travel back-and-forth and change the setting…
John Romero could be ordained as Pope, and people would still come up at mass and ask him about the early days of id Software and Doom. One of the key figures in early FPS history and by far the most infamous and outspoken, Romero’s brand of hirsute grungy swagger worked for a very simple reason: the games he designed and promoted were brilliant (until they weren’t).
These days Romero is head of Romero Games, currently working on an unannounced FPS, and has given an interview to Ars Technica about being known for Doom over three decades. Doom of course was the culmination of id’s work up until that point, but that was standing on the shoulders of the successful Wolfenstein 3D, which itself had followed from the earlier id titles Hovertank One and Catacomb 3-D.
It’s the latter title that Romero credits with opening his eyes. At the time id was best-known for its Commander Keen games, and were in the early stages of making another 2D side-scroll…
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU boasts two kinds of stunning fighting styles that are each tied to a mythical mask, and according to the animation lead, they are both inspired by just one martial art originating from Nigeria.
“Early on in development, we actually had three different masks,” the animation lead, Griffin Warner, explains in a Twitter video. “The mask that we ended up cutting, though, was the original melee powerhouse of the game, and its animation set was based on a martial art with Nigerian roots called Dambe.”
The inspiration that this third mask left behind, long after it was cut from Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, is glaringly obvious. Instead of Dambe being restricted to just one of the masks, the team over at Surgent Studios boiled the martial arts down to its two main premises and incorporated them into the remaining moon and sun masks.
In Dambe, fighters compete with a cloth-wrapped hand called a spear, which they use to make rapid and precise…
When artificial general intelligence (AGI) eventually arrives, will it be our servant? Our master? Or something else altogether, maybe even something supernatural? As a routine precaution, I for one welcome whatever form our new AI creations take. But Meta maestro Mark Zuckerberg reckons his competition in the AI industry are actually suffering from what you might call a God delusion.
Speaking to YouTube channel Kallaway (via Tech Crunch), El Zuck took aim at what he sees as the competition’s overly messianic approach to AI development.
“I find it a pretty big turnoff when people in the tech industry talk about building this ‘one true AI,’. It’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something. That’s not what we’re doing, I don’t think that’s how this plays out,” Zuckerberg said.
He also criticised what he saw as a monopolistic approach to AI development. “Some people are saying that there’s going to be the one tr…
We’ve got a lot of extraction shooter aficionados at PC Gamer, but I’ve never really been able to find one to float my boat. Then I got to check out The Forever Winter, an ambitious, improbably gloomy PvE extraction romp with heavy survival vibes and a penchant for ruthlessly murdering players—and it turned out that was exactly what I was looking for.
It hit early access yesterday, and I managed to survive a few scavenging hunts last night. I love it, but like a lot of multiplayer early access ventures, it’s still got plenty of kinks to work out. It’s sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam at the moment, largely because of performance issues. I’ve not actually had to deal with any myself, but I’m also running it on a pretty beefy rig with an RTX 4090 and an Intel i9-13900k.
One particular mechanic has also proven to be divisive, which doesn’t surprise me. A bit of background first: The Forever War is set during an apocalyptic conflict between two heavily mechanised f…
The US Department of Commerce has announced new export restrictions on a range of Nvidia GPUs, with the focus primarily on preventing shipments to China. Predictably, the list of chips acquiring export-contraband status include Nvidia AI-optimized hardware. But a gaming GPU has made the list for the first time, too. Yup, no more GeForce RTX 4090 cards for China.
Along with the RTX 4090, Nvidia’s A100, A800, H100, H800, L40, L40S GPU are all on the no-go list. Strictly speaking, this isn’t a China-only ban. The SEC filing (via Benchlife) states that the new restrictions apply to “China and Country Groups D1, D4, and D5 (including but not limited to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, but excluding Israel).”
Moreover, the filing doesn’t amount to an automatic and outright ban. Instead, it imposes “additional licensing requirements.” Technically, licenses to sell all of the restricted Nvidia GPUs can still be sought. However, the filing clarifies that no as…
Steam’s latest hardware survey has been released. The key trends for June 2023 show that Nvidia’s RTX 40-series is struggling to gain market share, while Windows 10 remains the most popular gaming OS by far.
Let’s begin with the video card results. Mid range xx50 and xx60 cards continue to dominate the list. The GTX 1650 is the most popular with a 5.50% share followed by the RTX 3060 at 4.50% and a previous list-topper, the GTX 1060 at 4.45%. In fact you have go down a further six spots before you encounter the RTX 3070. The majority of gamers simply cannot or will not spend big dollars on high end graphics cards.
AMD’s first entry is well down the list, and it’s just integrated graphics. AMD’s highest ranked discrete GPU is the venerable RX 580 with just 1% of the overall market share.
What’s interesting is how Nvidia’s RTX 40-series has so far failed to make much of an impression, with the mobile RTX 4060 coming in 29th spot and the RTX 4070 Ti coming in 35…
Handheld gaming PCs are loved by many of us in the PC Gamer hardware office and I especially like the Asus ROG Ally. The only thing I wished it had was a bigger screen, as the 7-inch 1080p panel limits how much you can do in Windows. One creative modder has solved that problem by making a clamshell attachment for an extra touchscreen, doubling the Ally’s amount of screen space.
Using a combination of off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed items designed by herself, modder Kira Patel (via Hot Hardware) has developed an ingenious solution to the ROG Ally’s relative lack of display size. The extra screen is just a cheap portable 7-inch 1024×600 IPS panel that’s normally designed to be used with the likes of a Raspberry Pi.
The first hurdle to overcome is the fact that the Ally can only support external monitors via its USB Type-C port, whereas the little external screen uses an HDMI port. This was solved by the use of a USB-to-HDMI adaptor, that was stripped right down so that …
It feels like the internet’s already made up its mind about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, to the degree that I can’t imagine it receiving any kind of fair response when it launches on February 2. It’s become a symbol of everything wrong with live-service games, which is a reputation I imagine Rocksteady is eager to get ahead of.
One way that’s been happening is in Q&As on the official Suicide Squad Discord server, where developers have been answering question about things like its battle pass, seasonal content, endgame, and multiplayer. The answers have been fairly promising. For starters, the battle pass will only hand out cosmetics and premium currency rather than anything game-altering, and it won’t be banished to the Phantom Zone once a season ends.
As studio director Darius Sadeghian said, “you will be able to go back and play previous Battle Passes after a Season ends. We believe that our team has created some of the best looking cosmetic items …
Let’s say you’re in the market for a new gaming PC and your budget is between $1,600 and $2,000. You’re rightly going to have some pretty serious expectations of any PC on offer. It will need to have a modern, fast CPU that’s been paired with plenty of equally fast RAM, to ensure that it’ll cope with all of the latest games.
Naturally, it must have a decent graphics card, too—one that supports all of the latest graphics technology and will cope with just about any rendering task you ask of it. Lastly, you’d expect to see plenty of storage, options for upgrading, and even things like cooling or lighting will need to pass muster. This ABS Stratos Ruby gaming PC ticks almost all those boxes.
Heading the specs table is the Ryzen 7 7700X CPU, with eight cores, 16 threads of Zen 4 architecture, and a boost clock of 5.4 GHz. It’s pretty light on power consumption, with a TDP of 105 W—20 W lower than equivalent Intel processors. Activate ECO mode and it’ll sip …
In an effort to stifle any public opinion that isn’t fawning or shows viewpoints the Kremlin doesn’t want the average Russian to see, the Russian government is going to try to ban virtual private networks (VPNs). According to a report from Russia’s RIA (H/T to Fudzilla), The regime wants to ban VPNs from March 1.
As the war in Ukraine shows little sign of ending any time soon, pressure mounts inside Russia. Citizens seek access to information that doesn’t come from Putin and his sycophants. RIA refers to statements made by Russian senator Artem Sheikin as saying that Russia’s telecom regulator Roskomnadzor has been directed to block VPNs that allow access to banned material.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are examples of sites banned under Russia’s Extremist law, but still accessible via a VPN.
VPN bans now appear to be the plan to combat access to these sites, but implementing a ban is easier said than done. Even China, which is fa…